Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

As a British driver, you get compared to Lewis and I get that. But when he came to McLaren, they were doing well and had a championship-winning car. I’m in a very different situation so I don’t compare myself to his stats.

God gave me some weird, beautiful scent that makes men and women go crazy. People compare it to Carvel. It is a whale of a smell.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Even though the risks of death are higher driving than flying, many people would rather drive simply because they feel they have more control driving. The facts are that only a few hundred people die a year flying, and 44,000 are killed a year driving.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

In all my years of baseball, I have always expected to be traded. I never liked the idea.

Reading isn’t good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn’t hit home runs. So I gave up reading.

I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

Mine is better than ours.

Career highlights? I had two – I got an intentional walk from Sandy Koufax and I got out of a rundown against the Mets.

Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

I think the word rich is all relative.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

That it will never come again is what makes life sweet.

If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.

Today, Negroes play on every big league club and in every minor league. With millions of other Negroes in other walks of life, we are willing to stand up and be counted for what we believe in. In baseball or out, we are no longer willing to wait until Judgment Day for equality – we want it here on earth as well as in Heaven.

Some day, following the example of the United States of America, there will be a United States of Europe.

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

All I can tell them is pick a good one and sock it. I get back to the dugout and they ask me what it was I hit and I tell them I don’t know except it looked good.

I hate what I look like on TV, and I want to look better, and nothing makes the mothers more jealous.

When you work with kids, especially, you want to be ready to turn the camera on at a moment’s notice.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

We believe that according the name ‚investors‘ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‚romantic.‘

Doing a show for three weeks is nothing like doing a show for seven seasons.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don’t have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks.

Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus.

In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask, ‚why don’t I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden,‘ and they abandon their values.

People have asked me a lot of times, because I didn’t hit a lot, how long a dozen bats would last me. Depending on the weight and model I was using at that time – I would say eight to 10 cookouts.

If it wasn’t for baseball, I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.

I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel? The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

There is only a finger’s difference between a wise man and a fool.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

You know, I was once named Minor League Player of the Year… unfortunately, I had been in the majors for two years at the time.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Gospel music is never pessimistic, it’s never ‚oh my god, its all going down the tubes‘, like the blues often is.

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.

When I am playing baseball, I give it all that I have on the ball field. When the ball game is over, I certainly don’t take it home. My little girl who is sitting out there wouldn’t know the difference between a third strike and a foul ball. We don’t talk about baseball at home.

Man never thinks himself happy, but when he enjoys those things which others want or desire.

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

In 1962 I was named Minor League Player of the Year. It was my second season in the bigs.

Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don’t run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

I didn’t mean to hit the umpire with the dirt, but I did mean to hit that bastard in the stands.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.

He does it with better grace, but I do it more natural.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

If I had to choose a superhero to be, I would pick Superman. He’s everything that I’m not.

The way to catch a knuckleball is to wait until it stops rolling and then pick it up.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.